When Asia Was the World

Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the “Riches of the East”

By: Stewart Gordon

Narrated by: Derek Perkins

Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

While European intellectual, cultural, and commercial life stagnated during the early medieval period, Asia flourished as the wellspring of science, philosophy, and religion. Linked together by a web of religious, commercial, and intellectual connections, the different regions of Asia's vast civilization, from Arabia to China, hummed with commerce, international diplomacy, and the brisk exchange of ideas.

Stewart Gordon has fashioned a fascinating and unique look at Asia from AD 700 to 1500, a time when Asia was the world, by describing the personal journeys of Asia's many travelers - the merchants who traded spices along the Silk Road, the apothecaries who exchanged medicine and knowledge from China to the Middle East, and the philosophers and holy men who crossed continents to explore and exchange ideas, books, science, and culture.

©2008 Stewart Gordon (P)2018 Tantor

A history book without border, politics, and wars

I think most people like me learn history from textbooks. As I listened to this book, my textbook learning ran in parallel in the back of my mind ... and thought... WOW, so this is what travel, commerce, and society were like back in those periods when who's who were on the throne. This book puts technicolor to otherwise boring history lessons. It really widens my mind about Asia. After listening to this book, I bought a paperback because it has maps. The maps gave a better perspective on the distance and terrain. I also like Mr. Perkins narration. This book covers traveling across Asia and over several centuries. It's appropriate to pronounce names and places with standardized English phonetics. If a book covers one location in one period of time, then I would agree that the pronunciation of names and places should be authentic. But this is not that kind of book. Overall, I highly recommend this book.

Learn the names you are reading

Please stop unabashedly butchering foreign people and place names. It makes it hard to figure out without the text.

Only good as a substitute for melatonin

I fell asleep 63.5 times in the first chapter alone and another 12,762.345 times throughout the rest of the book. It’s more entertaining to read a literal dictionary than to read this book. I would legitimately rather read the terms and conditions of a game or update than read this book. This was so mind-numbingly boring that I would rather have listened to nails on a chalkboard than this “literature”. I have been more entertained at the doctors office than I was listening to this book. I believe this book was actually just an experimental way to make you fall asleep remotely.